by mr dan
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We’re often told that the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are the model of morality, even if we don’t agree that he was the Messiah.  People frequently tell me that I can’t argue with what Jesus said.  So, one might expect that if we examine his life, what he is supposed to have done and said, we would find no action that cannot be ethically and logically justified. But the reason Christianity remains so popular is that almost nobody examines his life.

Jesus wasn’t real, but since there are books written about him, we can analyze his character and attributes the same way we would Tom Sawyer or Captain Kirk.  I want to examine one particular act that I find outrageously immoral.  It’s a story which, broadly, every Christian knows, but, like many stories in the Bible, it has many versions, and Christians only retell the parts they like.

The story is told in all four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — and there is enough similarity between the four versions to indicate that they are different tellings of the same story, even though there are some variations.  Roughly it goes something like this:

Jesus goes to Bethany and dines with his disciples.  A woman brings an expensive perfumed ointment made of something called nard and pours it either on Jesus’ feet (according to Luke and John) or on his head (according to Mark and Matthew).  Three of the four gospels report his disciples reacting indignantly.  They tell their master that this seems an unnecessary luxury, and that the right thing to do would have been to sell the ointment instead — Mark and John tell us it was worth what most workers earned in a year.  But Jesus tells them not to rebuke the woman, because her intention was to do something nice for Jesus.  Fair enough, I suppose.  Then he says something that I cannot comprehend at all.  ”The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.”

Yes, that’s Christian morality for you.  Forget everything I said about charity and virtue and kindness — there will be time for that later.  Right now I want this lady to rub some goo on me.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily make Jesus a terrible person.  I certainly have not taken advantage of every opportunity I’ve ever had to help the poor, nor do I necessarily think that everyone should give up all luxury as a sacrifice for the less fortunate.  To do so, we would probably agree, would be perfect, and nobody is perfect.  Not even, it would seem, Jesus.

But I have to stand with the disciples.  To put it in context, that jar of nard would be worth $39,000 today.  If I told you I spent $39,000 on a greasy scalp massage, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to tell me all the much better things I could have and should have done with that money.  And you’d be right.  Everyone who works hard deserves the freedom to spend their money how they choose, including on personal luxuries.  But this is exactly the kind of cram-the-camel-through-the-eye-of-the-needle extravagance that Jesus supposedly preached against.  I guess it’s no wonder that this story gets swept under the rug.

In a superbly ironic twist, Mark and Matt even close with Jesus telling his disciples that “wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Seems a mite odd when you consider that most Christians don’t know this story — at least not in its entirety.  Whenever I ask a Christian about Jesus’s selfish act or his proclamation that poverty will never be alleviated and we might as well not even bother, they tell me irately that I’ve got my facts wrong.  That isn’t the way they learned it in church, so I must be incorrect.

There’s one more aspect of this story that I find disturbing.  One Gospel writer adds a detail that the other evangelists don’t.  According to John, it is not all of the disciples who chastise Jesus for not selling the ointment, but only Judas.  And his motives were not charitable.  “He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.”

It would seem that caring for the poor is never an act of charity but merely an attempt by devious persons to filch from the Messiah’s coin purse.  Are Christians expected to follow the writer’s example and ignore the indulgences and hypocrisies of their leaders and instead allege wrongdoing on each other? If so, mission accomplished.

Poverty may very well be a problem that we can’t completely solve.  But that seems all the more reason to do what we can.  If we accept the Nazarene’s defeatist attitude and give up on trying to solve problems that seem at the moment impossible, we abandon all hope of progress and advancement.  If we make a conscious choice to ignore the suffering of others for the sake of our own excessive pleasures, we lose any claim to morality and virtue.  If we greet with suspicion and accusation those who attempt to help the less fortunate, we create an environment in which those virtues are unwelcome and become rare.  And if even Jesus can’t live up to his own ethical ideals, you don’t have any grounds to call him the cornerstone of morality.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan

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For reasons I’ll never understand, atheists and agnostics are always thrown into the same group.  Look at any study on religion, or demographic statistics, or even just they way society as a whole talks about us and you’d think the terms were synonyms. But I think agnosticism is very far from atheism, and most agnostics would agree, a fact confirmed by the amount of time they spend making sure to distinguish themselves from atheists while actually doing more to attack and criticize skepticism than fundamentalist theists do.

Of course, there are as many breeds of agnostic as there are agnostics, but if I may be so bold I’d like to divide them into two categories.  I’ll call the first group uncertain agnostics: those who think there may or may not be some spiritual or controlling force that created and/or governs the universe, who usually think there isn’t enough evidence at this time to make an informed decision either way.  I don’t agree with you guys, but you’re pretty cool.  Just keep doing your thing.

The second group I’ll call equal-probability agnostics.  These are the people who feel that there is an equal probability that any of the world’s religions may be true.  For all they claim to be open-minded and enlightened, an equal-probability agnostic is merely a person who has failed to recognize that a man is not more buoyant than water.  You can’t be a critical thinker and also believe that a man lived for three days in the belly of a big fish, or defied gravity and became flame-retardant long enough to go up to Heaven in a chariot of fire.

And when you try to say something like, “Look, dude, even if a man could live for three days in the belly of a fish, there isn’t even any species of fish known to biology whose mouth and throat are big enough to swallow a man whole,” they just retort, “That’s because you’re just too closed-minded to see those fish,” or, “You can’t prove that there is no such fish.”  When they finally get around to trying, “How do you know God didn’t create a special fish just for that occasion?” — well, by then you should be able to see that agnosticism is nothing like atheism.

It’s said that agnosticism is just weak atheism, but I really think it’s weak theism.  It’s just accepting the premise of Pascal’s Wager and then trying to cheat.  I can just envision these people on Judgement Day saying, “Come on, Pete, you’ve got to let me in — I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

While technically an agnostic claims neither belief nor disbelief in God, it has been my experience that they almost always disbelieve in disbelief.  Most commonly, they are sure that there must be something but that its true nature cannot be known.  And many people who call themselves agnostics will tell you they fall into the first category, the uncertain agnostics, but the more you talk to them the more they reveal themselves to be in the latter group — the equal-probablity crowd.

The main difficulty that agnostics have with atheism seems to be the claim that atheism is arrogant, that we think we know all the answers.  But nonbelievers are just that — we don’t believe in gods.  We don’t pretend that there is any proof that no gods exist, only a complete lack of evidence, and a wealth of evidence in science that disproves the specific details of each religion’s story.  Each tale is so full of holes and inconsistencies and notions now thoroughly disproved that  there is no reason to believe in any of them, so it’s not arrogant to arrive at the logical conclusion of nonexistence.  Contradictory evidence would make us change our minds, but given the facts before us, we think we’ve made a wise inference.

If you can be sure that the earth is a spherical chunk of rock that orbits a much larger blob of burning plasma, then you can be sure that it wasn’t created in six days by an invisible sky fairy.  Knowledge and the scientific method can easily discount this scenario.  But if you fall into this category that says all religions can’t be disproved and therefore should be considered likely to be true, then you must accept the possibility that human beings may have been made from a man’s rib or from a blood clot, that angels have appeared all over the world, from Jerusalem to Upstate New York, that you’ll go to heaven so long as you don’t still have your foreskin or labia.  You cannot believe wholeheartedly in evolution, because most religions tell a contradictory story about the origins of man, and those could just as well be true. You’ve got to accept that we may be ensnared in an endless cycle of reincarnation, and that the rapture may have already happened and we have been left behind.  And you absolutely can’t discount the idea that a dictator of the Galactic Confederacy may have prevented overpopulation on his home planet by tricking millions of people into thinking they were going to get income tax advice but actually freezing them, bringing them to Earth on a jetless airliner, stacking their bodies around volcanoes and dropping hydrogen bombs inside — because you can’t prove that that didn’t happen.

Being open-minded is great.  But clinging to any and every outlandish idea that comes along just so you can say that you’re not in error, and then attacking anyone who points out the obvious flaws in those beliefs, is not open-mindedness.  It’s just waiting until the very end of the game to place your bet and then trying to collect all the winnings.  And if you accept any possibility that the fairy tales of religion, not just the vague idea of a creator but the specific nonsense fantasies, are true, your thought process doesn’t work the same way as an atheist’s, and there is no sense in classifying the two together.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan

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If you’re out as an atheist you’ve probably heard just about every possible opposing argument.  There must be a god because our planet is in the Goldilocks Zone!  If there’s no god, how come I find my hideous baby adorable?  If God isn’t real, who put those presents under my tree? And so on.

Once you’ve easily dismissed these arguments and your intellectual opponent has realized that you actually know what you’re talking about, he or she is likely to grasp at this argument: “human beings are not capable of ever fully understanding the question of god.  It’s in a realm of its own.  God is too big and too powerful for the human brain, and if we ever did know the truth, our heads would explode!” Mind you, they’re not just saying that we can’t know what God looks like or what his middle name is; merely knowing whether God exists or not would cause a cranial detonation the likes of which I have no special effects budget for.

This is obviously just a way of saying, “I know my answer has a lot of holes in it, but that’s because our brains can’t fathom the truth.”  Actually, it’s really just that your answer has holes in it, and human beings are far more intelligent than theists give us credit for.

Now, I’m not saying there’s nothing out there that we can’t comprehend.  There may indeed be some questions that we can never answer, not for lack of evidence but utter inability to understand.  I imagine that no matter how hard you tried it would be impossible to explain to an ant how an internal-combustion engine works.  And that’s a relatively simple concept that even I understand.  (To any researchers who are working on this or have achieved this, stop wasting my tax dollars and make an affordable biofuel that actually works!)

But as far as this question goes, it’s a simple question.   In fact, the simplest of all. Is there a God?  The answer is either yes or no.  No magic, no tricks, just a simple binary option.  God exists or God doesn’t exist.  The question is not a complicated one. Now, once you’ve settled on the answer “yes”, the questions that follow become infinitely complicated, with each person shaping their answer to align with their pre-concieved notions about how the world should be.

This is not to say that proving that the answer is yes or that the answer is no is an easy task.   In fact, proving that the answer is no, most would agree, is impossible.  Proving god exists is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack, except there never was any needle.  But we can’t exactly prove that there is no needle because the haystack is eleventy-billion miles high and the needle is said to be invisible and has no mass…but may or may not have testicles.

Just because you make up complicated answers to a question doesn’t make it a complicated question.  And declaring me ignorant just because I refuse to make up an answer doesn’t make you more enlightened.  It just makes you more arrogant.  There are enough complicated questions in the world without telling people that the simple ones are unfathomable.  Your mental shortcomings are not my problem.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan
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Normally I don’t follow the latest circus-themed gangsta rap, so you’ll have to forgive me for being a little behind the times on this, but have you seen the latest video by the Insane Clown Posse?  The song is called “Miracles” and, in that pretentious yet uneducated manner so typical of rapping gang members who want to seem all “deep” now and again, it tells of all the everyday miracles all around us.  You know, like giraffes, reproduction and magnets.

The Insane Clown Posse consists of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, two former gang members and professional wrestlers with ninth-grade educations and criminal records.  Since the mid 1980’s this duo has donned clown make-up and made the sort of violent and disturbing hip-hop that drew the ire of conservative Christians and the PMRC.

But with their latest release, the circus freaks and the Jesus freaks can finally come together as one.  On “Miracles,”  Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, self-proclaimed Christians, show themselves to be ignorant of sixth-grade science. Its childish lyrics read like a compilation of profane Sarah Palin tweets, and its message is far more dangerous.

The song has gotten over 4 million hits on YouTube, though I can’t help but notice about two thirds of the viewers who rated it disliked the video, which would seem to imply that most people watched it for its sheer comedic value rather than any interest in the song.

I don’t have time to do a line-by-line analysis of these hickish rantings, but I have to share a few of my favorite lyrics with you.

Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long-necked giraffes and pet cats and dogs.

Yeah, so… That’s a list of things Shaggy and J think are miracles.  Truth is, there is no longer any mystery to plate tectonics or meteorology.  We can’t predict the weather very well, but we know how it works.  And not only is the evolution of giraffes well-understood, but domestic cats and dogs aren’t even really wild animals.  Even if you believe that God made the world as it is five thousand years ago, microevolution has undeniably occurred since then — including the well-documented and observable breeding of cats and dogs to largely human specifications.  I haven’t seen an alleged miracle so pathetic since Ray Comfort got his hand ready to grip a banana.

Pure magic is the birth of my kids.
I seen shit that’ll shock your eyelids.

Yes, the placenta is kind of gross, but human reproduction is a process that we understand in great detail.  There are doctors, nurses and therapists who make their career on childbirth and family planning, both aiding in it and preventing it.  Again, clearly not a miracle.

I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay.
It tried to eat my cell phone.  He ran away.

Sigh.  See what we’re dealing with here?

Fucking rainbows after it rains.
There’s enough miracles here to blow your brains.

Seriously, what is it with crazy people and rainbows? Remember the lady who blamed the government for the rainbow in her sprinkler?  Or the Double Rainbow Guy?  “What does this mean?”  It means that sunlight is being refracted and reflected through water droplets in the air.  It’s not rocket science.

Okay, one more. This is my favorite, and it seems to be everyone else’s as well because the line is so ridiculous that it has become a meme unto itself.

Water, fire, air and dirt.
Fucking magnets — how do they work?

As any third-grade science teacher can tell you, magnets contain tiny male gnomes who totally want to have sex with the female gnomes inside my refrigerator (okay, that isn’t true).

But while everyone was laughing at the ludicrousness of that line, they may have missed the line that immediately follows it. While I find the rest of the song ignorant enough to be funny, the next bit actually makes me irate, since it expresses an idea which I think is far more dangerous than just not knowing what Wikipedia is.

And I don’t wanna’ talk to a scientist.
Y’all motherfuckers lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed.

Suddenly it’s not so funny anymore.

Sing a song about domestic abuse or school shootings, and a million people will listen to it, and maybe one will be inspired by the song to do it, and most of us would agree that that person probably had severe mental problems to begin with.  But sing a song about how Science is an evil conspiracy to eliminate the magic of the world and (more importantly) stressing that education is unnecessary, and that’s an idea that can really sink in to people.

I also love the idea that I’m constantly being told to open my mind and to “notice and recognize” the miracles so evident around me.  This reminds me of the people who insist that proof of God is in a child’s face, or that the rescue of thirty-three Chileans from a collapsed mine shaft is a miracle that had nothing to do with the engineers and other miners who used their intellect, skills and strength to find a practical and successful solution instead of just praying.  Sometimes the most powerful weapon theists have is the ability to convince you that if you don’t agree with them, you’re the one who’s ignorant and simple.  Sadly, it works too often.

The most important thing that education can teach you is how to learn.  How to figure things out.  Maybe most of us can go our whole lives without being able to recite from memory how magnets work.  But we’re not going to make it very far if we assume that everything around us that we can’t immediately explain is a miracle — especially if those things already have well-documented and understood explanations that we’re just too lazy or stupid to look up.  I don’t want to live in a world where people think that there’s a very small and versatile band living inside their iPod.

The video has become a punchline in all the intelligent corners of the internets, and was the subject of a parody by Saturday Night Live. The ICP have tried to defend themselves against accusations that their song is frickin’ stupid by insisting that there may indeed be scientific explanations for all these things, if you want to be an egghead and sit around reading books all day.  “It’s a lot funner being the dumb guy,” says Violent J, “because then we get to appreciate beautiful things like all the miracles we talk about.”  Shaggy 2 Dope states that “science can be real exciting, but I’d rather get what you call ‘pussy’.”

But the message of the song really should be this:  the world is amazing.  It’s filled with fascinating things, and we’ve figured out how most of them work, but that doesn’t make it any less extraordinary.  I think the fact that the pyramids of Egypt were built by humans is so much cooler than thinking they were built by saucer people.  So, maybe just try listening to these lines and pretend that they’re talking about science rather than God and magic.

Miracles [SCIENCE] each and every where you look,
And nobody has to stay where they put.
This world is yours for you to explore.
It’s nothing but miracles [SCIENCE] beyond your door.
The Dark Carnival is your invitation
To witness that without [WITH] explanation.
Take a look at this fine creation [NATURAL OCCURRENCE]
And enjoy it better with appreciation.

We do enjoy and appreciate the world because we know the explanation.  You can be smart and still be filled with wonder.  What this ignorant clown posse doesn’t realize is that jamming your fingers in your ears and rapping poorly while someone tries to tell you the truth will never be as exciting or astounding as knowing where babies actually come from.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan
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By now you know the name Carl Paladino.  He’s a Tea Party candidate running on the  Republican ticket to be governor of the state of New York. Oh, and he cheated on his wife, made a death threat to a New York Post Columnist, and forwarded emails to friends containing racist bestiality porn.  Yes, he’s the religious values candidate.

Now, except for the racism, the death threat and the girls being ridden by horses, I think what a candidate does in his private life is not really our business, and we should expect the same courtesy in return.  But Mr Paladino is not content to live hypocritically and let live.  He recently had some nasty things to say after his opponent, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, marched in a gay pride parade.

“That’s not the example we should be showing our children, and certainly not in our schools. [...] I just think my children and your children would be better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family.   And I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.”

Paladino claims he does not personally disapprove of homosexuals and even used the how-could-I-possibly-be-a-bigot-when-I-have-a-gay-nephew excuse.  He just doesn’t want them to get married, because that’s a straight right.  But he also said that homosexuality is unacceptable and not a good example to be setting.  And it’s fair to note that he has expressed his opposition to gay pride and his fear of the homosexual agenda, not just same-sex marriage.

The original speech contained a more infuriating line: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” To his credit, Paladino skipped this line when reading the speech, but the original text had already been released.  Now, it’s not uncommon for a speechwriter to include an idea in an address of a candidate who makes no effort to proofread.  Maybe Paladino objected to the idea that gays shouldn’t be proud, or maybe he thought it was too strong to call homosexuals “dysfunctional.”  Or maybe he wanted to express the idea through the written text but didn’t want to say it out loud, disseminating his bigotry while making it difficult to attack him for it.

In any case, it’s absolutely true that homosexuality nothing to be proud of.  But it’s also nothing to be ashamed of.  It’s just a detail about you, like being left-handed.  All it means is that you’re part of the roughly 10% of the public that does all the same things as everybody else, just in a slightly different position.

When people march in these gay pride parades, they’re not expressing pride in the fact that they’re gay.  They’re expressing pride in the fact that they can be open about who they are in an environment that is still far too hostile.  That they can stare down the religious dogmatists who attack them and the politicians who try to disgrace them for a few more percentage points.  That they can all come together as one to let you know that they exist and are deserving of your respect.

Even 10 years ago it seemed impossible to think that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell might be repealed, that atheist books might be on the bestseller list, that anyone darker than Homer Plessy might find themselves in the Oval Office.  None of the problems facing these groups has been completely solved. But anyone who was alive then and isn’t now missed how much has changed, how much better it has gotten. Anyone watching this who isn’t alive in another ten years, or in another ten months, will have missed everything we’re working on.

While there may be secular homophobes, there is no secular justification for homophobia.   These bigots, whether schoolyard bullies or gubernatorial candidates, may not openly cite the Bible, but their hatred cannot be accounted for without some religious superstition.

Obviously the most common claim, that being gay is a sin, can be easily dismissed by the non-believer.  Another frequent attack is that same-sex coupling is unnatural.  But not only is this not true — homosexual activity has been observed in over 1500 different species of animals — but it presumes that Nature has dictated some standard way for us to behave.  That there is one “correct” way, according to the laws of nature, for us to fall in love or reach orgasm puts a great deal of faith in the moral sentience of the universe.  Saying it goes against nature is really just another way of say it’s not what the Creator of the Universe intended, and obviously no atheist could use this excuse.

Also, if you think homosexuality is unnatural, what about tennis?  Think about it.  It’s completely unnatural.  No other species in nature does it.  it serves no procreative purpose, and there’s nothing in the Bible about it being part of God’s plan.  Shall we just go ahead and make that illegal too?  There is less of a biological justification for tennis than there is for homosexuality.

Equally silly is the idea that homosexuality is antithetical to family values.  It’s only true if your so-called family values include hatred and discrimination.  But if you consider family values to be raising children and teaching them to be smart, accepting and loving, caring for one another, looking out for the safety and peace of their community, devotion to one’s family and partner — well, there’s nothing in the “homosexual agenda” that conflicts with any of that.

Homophobia cannot stand up to secular thought.  I defy anyone watching this who thinks homosexuality is wrong or bad for any reason other than personal preference to give me an explanation that does not in some way invoke theism.  Go ahead.  Type it into that little box down there.  I’ll be waiting here all agog to see what you come up with.  For the rest of you watching, just remember that it gets better.  The day when a hypocritical bigot like Carl Paladino would lose all political support and public respect for saying the things he said, when personal bullies are punished for their hate speech instead of being praised as good Christians, when it’s okay to be you — that day will come soon.  I hope you’re all still here to see it.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by Johanna
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If you live in America, or have ever visited the country, you’ve no doubt noticed that nearly every coin and bill printed in the US proudly declares “In God We Trust.” This baffles me. Trusting in God has nothing to do with the monetary system. Our economy isn’t a faith-based initiative. At no point in Genesis did God supposedly say “Let there be currency.” You don’t have to be a Christian to use a twenty, and the Pope doesn’t mint our coins.

I understand the history behind the decision — well, I’ve heard the history. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’m aware of what happened. For those of you who aren’t, God is on our money to prove we aren’t communists. You know, because not believing in God is the same thing as abolishing wage labor.

Ok, it actually goes back a little further than that. The first coin to bear the phrase was an 1864 two-cent piece. The phrase rose in popularity over the next few decades, becoming a permanent fixture on most coins after 1908. Paper money, on the other hand, was safe until 1957, the year following the Congressional resolution to replace the nation’s existing motto (E Pluribus Unum) with the new, McCarthy-esque version. The practice began because of our preoccupation with religion during the war against ourselves and was expanded because of our preoccupation with religion during the war against Communism. Oh, and in 2006, Congress voted to reaffirm “In God We Trust” as our national motto… because of our preoccupation with religion during our war on Terror. At this rate, I predict that by 2050, our preoccupation with religion during our war against the Mole people will lead us to begin tattooing the phrase on babies or something.

The justification for adopting the phrase as our official motto was pretty thin; it was all part of a very successful campaign to equate communism with atheism. The fact that it was done to discourage atheism is a slap in the face of the Establishment Clause, and the fact that it has since been upheld by numerous court decisions is utterly astounding. Cases concerning the constitutionality of the phrase rarely make it to higher courts because they’re generally dismissed out of hand. In 1970, Aronow v. United States brought the matter as far as the US Court of Appeals. They had this to say:

“It is quite obvious that the national motto and the slogan on coinage and currency ‘In God We Trust’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion. Its use is of patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise.”

Hear that, theists? God is a ceremonial character. In fact, any government-endorsed statements regarding God are merely examples of “ceremonial deism.” As Justice Brennan stated in his dissenting opinion in Lynch v. Donnelly in 1984,

“Such practices as the designation of ‘In God We Trust’ as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, can best be understood, in Dean Rostow’s apt phrase, as a form of ‘ceremonial deism,’ protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.”

That’s right; “rote repetition” has the power to strip words of their religious content. The Pledge of Allegiance is entirely secular, “So Help Me God” is a non-religious oath, and the Our Father is just a poem.

However, some rather prominent political figures appear to disagree. Ronald Reagan, for instance, said:

“Our Nation’s motto — “In God We Trust” — was not chosen lightly. It reflects a basic recognition that there is a divine authority in the universe to which this Nation owes homage.”

If that’s not a government endorsement of religion, I don’t know what is. You may argue, as many have, that it is merely supporting theism over atheism, and that this is somehow acceptable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that it’s “freedom of religion, not freedom from religion,” as if you can have one without the other. Pressuring or requiring someone to follow a religion is the same regardless of that person’s starting point.

At any rate, the statement “In God We Trust” doesn’t only exclude atheists. It excludes anyone who believes in multiple deities, like Wiccans and Hindus; and those who are religious yet believe in no deity or believe that “divine authority” is called something other than God, like Buddhists, spiritualists, and Scientologists. It also excludes any deist that believes this nation owes nothing to any divine authority.

“Ceremonial deism” be damned. Wishful thinking or not, I want that statement out of our courthouses, away from our schools, and above all? I want it off my money.

Johanna is a member of CVA. The views expressed in this post are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan
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This week the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of a survey called the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.  As you may have already heard, we atheists completely kicked ass, and the news sent shock waves across the internet and the 24-hour news cycle like Christine O’Donnell had just said something.

There is an abbreviated version of the survey on the Pew Forum’s website. I’m not going to give away any of the answers because I want you to take the quiz as well and let me know how you did. I’m not one to toot my own horn but I got 15 out of 15 correct.  That’s right, I know everything there is to know about religion.  Okay, that’s really not what it means, but getting a perfect score does indicate that I know a hell of a lot more about religion than the average American.

When all the scores had been tallied, it turned out most people knew about half the answers (which makes me twice as smart as them).  Atheists and agnostics knew 65% of the answers and Jews knew 64%. Mormons were next at 63%.  When you count all the various Christian groups, it looks like they got about 46 and a half percent right, or 49% if you count Mormons as Christians — which I do, and Mormons do, but other Christians don’t.

While most people were fascinated that atheists performed so mid-blowingly well, I was fascinated by the fascination.  It’s not a surprise to me that people who don’t believe in something may know more about it than those who do.  But here’s the thing that really surprised me. When respondents are grouped by how frequently they attend worship service, the scores pretty much even out.  There is almost no difference in the religious literacy of people who never go to church and people who go every day.

Most people knew who led the Jews out of Egypt and could name Mother Teresa’s  religion, but only about half knew whether the Golden Rule is one of the Ten Commandments, or could name all four Gospels of Christianity.  Almost half the respondents didn’t know what Ramadan or the Koran are.  And in today’s world of tense interfaith relations, the latter is a hell of a lot more relevant than who built the Ark.  Ignorance will only lead the world into disaster.

Which brings me back to Christine O’Donnell.  You’ve all seen the famous clip from Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in which this tea-bagging nutjob now running for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware said she knows about Wicca because she “dabbled” in it in high school.  Now, a lot of people thought this was a crazy skeleton in her closet.  I usually don’t judge a person for something they did in the past and now disavow.  Many of my friends who are atheists now once firmly believed in the religion of their youth.  I just take issue with her thinking that hanging out with the kids who dressed in black gives her the right to call herself an expert.

Now, I’m not an expert on anything.  But I do know a bit.  I can’t say I’ve read the entire Bible cover to cover, but I have read the whole of the New Testament, as well as the first five books of the Old Testament, and then a whole bunch of sporadic stuff from rest of the OT.  And I was raised going to a Methodist Church and Sunday school, an later a Lutheran Church.  I have friends and family who are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons.  I almost married a deacon’s daughter.  So I think I’m rather familiar with the stupidity that comprises Christianity.

But still, no matter what criticism I have of religion, and how much information I have to back it up, the believer’s ubiquitous retort is “You don’t understand religion.  You can’t understand it because you’re an outsider. You don’t share our faith, and without faith, you can’t really know the true meaning of God’s words.”

So, why does Christine O’Donnell get away with saying she knows about Wicca just because she went on a date with a witch?  If supreme knowledge could be obtained via dates, no one would ever have to sleep with their professors to get an A — they could just take them to dinner.

People always say to me, “I know about atheism because my boyfriend in college was an atheist, and he wore socks with sandals, so it must be wrong.”  To them, riding an elevator with a Hindu makes you an expert, but even my friends who are former born-agains who were born a third time into atheism can’t get any credit for knowing what the hell they’re talking about.

Christine O’Donnell’s claim to expertness falls flat anyway if you know the facts.  She clearly knows nothing about Wicca if she thinks a Witch took her to a midnight picnic on a bloodied Satanic altar.  Wiccans, in fact, do not worship Satan or practice human or animal sacrifice.  Looks like I knew something else she didn’t know.  Sorry, Christine.  I guess it takes more than a dabbling to be an expert.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by Johanna.
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One of the most effective things a religion can do is appropriate a biological imperative. We humans like to think of ourselves as a pretty diverse bunch, but there are plenty of core motivations we all have in common. You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; it’s a basic description of how we prioritize our goals and desires. Before we can consider the more transcendent needs like love, self-actualization, or sports cars, we must first fulfill the most basic needs like food, water, sex and shelter.

In terms of evolution, it’s pretty easy to see why this is the case. Genetic combinations that encourage their own perpetuation are the most successful. Creatures that prioritize survival and reproduction will thrive. For humans, this means surviving until capable of reproducing, then protecting descendants; therefore preserving and passing on one’s own genes. We’re like a global Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Everything beyond that—success, happiness, cell phones, etc.—is a bonus. Take away one of our basic needs like clean water or a reliable source of food, and we’re no longer concerned about who has a guest appearance on 30 Rock.

By usurping any of these basic needs, religion can get in on the ground floor. Generally, a need for community is secondary and spirituality is tertiary at best. Once religion is tied in with our most fundamental drives, however, it becomes a primary concern.

The two easiest needs to usurp? Food and sex. Everybody gets hungry and horny. It’s a fact of life. Society can’t function if there are no restraints on what we eat and who we screw; measures need to be taken so food is as safe as possible and sex should always be consensual. Religion, however, makes rules about when and how it’s acceptable to satiate these needs that have nothing to do with E Coli or statutory rape.

With food, there are rules about what and when it is acceptable to eat. Many religions have annual fasts, such as Islam’s Ramadan or the Baha’I faith’s month of Ala. Adherents are expected to resist hunger for the required allotment of time—often dawn to dusk for days on end—in order to experience a deeper level of spirituality through obedience and self-deprivation. In equating starvation with salvation, food and faith are inextricably linked. Satiating hunger is only possible through faith, and faith will sustain a person in ways that food cannot. It becomes impossible to imagine filling that basic need for sustenance without the assistance of God. Giving thanks before each meal, as people do in many religions, only reinforces this link.

Many religions also dictate what can be eaten. With some, there are specific foods that are considered taboo. Others take it much further, requiring a strict adherence to a complex set of rules. Those who follow a strict kosher diet are required to keep their faith in mind any time they even think about eating. When your position in the afterlife is closely tied to something as basic as food, religion can never be far from your mind.

With sex, most religions pull out the big guns: shame. This is one of the most powerful weapons in religion’s arsenal. That’s not to say that shame doesn’t exist independently of religion, but it is yet another human tendency that religions have twisted to serve their own needs.

Children are taught from a young age that certain desires are wrong and even shameful. Of course, children aren’t terribly concerned with these desires. Sex doesn’t usually enter the equation until puberty. Religious leaders and parents have years to lay the foundations of what will later become the neurosis and obsessions that make people cling so desperately to their faith.

I’m going to come right out and say it: the way most of the major religions handle sex? It’s ingenious. Evil genius, don’t get me wrong, but the results they get are truly incredible. Lex Luthor and Dr. Horrible have nothing on these guys.

See, when you’re a kid, you’re not capable of much in the way of rationality or thoughtful consideration. That comes later in life. It’s not difficult to get kids to believe in God; as long as their parents tell them Jesus is watching or Allah will judge them or Santa double-checks that big old list, they’re going to accept it as fact. Sure, they know that there are rules to follow, especially if they want to get that eternal reward, but most of it goes over their heads. They know they’re supposed to listen to their parents, and that’s good enough for most of them. If they misbehave, they’ll get a time-out and move on with their lives.

Then puberty happens. This is the time that they start questioning authority. This new-found defiance is a legitimate threat to their religious beliefs. After all, they’re questioning everything else their parents ever told them, why not the existence of God? If it weren’t for raging hormones, the religious attrition rate of teenagers would be devastating. The reason it’s not is because of all that careful groundwork that’s been laid for over a decade. See, all that stuff about deadly sins and lusts of the flesh that didn’t seem to apply to them before? Suddenly it’s front and center. There’s boobs and boners everywhere, and for the first time in their lives, Hell seems like a real possibility. They spend years assuming that Hell is for other people, only to become one of those people themselves.

Everyone deals with this new reality differently. Some throw themselves into religion immediately, praying for the strength and guidance they never really needed before. Others give into temptation before the guilt and shame overwhelm them; for these people, religion is even more necessary because they have actual, physical sin to repent. Still others rebel for years, only to be reborn again with a fervor that defies all logic and expectation. Some people do manage to break away entirely, but it’s nearly impossible to overcome all those years of conditioning and brainwashing. The shame associated with sex is deeply ingrained long before the desire itself is present.

Interestingly enough, lust is pretty much the only sin where inspiring it is considered just as evil as experiencing it. Inspiring jealousy isn’t sinful. The biblical commandment says not to covet your neighbor’s ass; it doesn’t say anything about the neighbor’s responsibility to hide his ass under a bushel. Nobody stones rich people to death for having nice things—well, at least not for religious reasons.

Because religious societies are so hung up on sex and lust, women get harassed for breast feeding their babies in public. Rape victims get blamed for wearing short skirts. Earthquakes get blamed on cleavage. Women who have spent their entire lives swathed in fabric are beaten for accidentally showing an inch of skin. Fanatical fathers murder their daughters to keep her shame from besmirching the family’s honor.

Equating religion with basic survival needs makes people as desperate to protect it as they would water or air. Strangle a man, and he’ll kill you if that’s what it takes get his oxygen back. Starve him, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get food. What religion does is present itself as the only viable access to certain needs. Hunger seems impossible to assuage without having access to God as well as food. Sex is shameful and wrong unless achieved through the proper bonds of marriage. This means that getting between a man and his religion is, in his mind, tantamount to getting between him and his most basic needs, and that’s a dangerous place to be. It also means that most people would no sooner abandon their beliefs than they would go skydiving without a parachute.

Look, faith can’t feed you and lust isn’t evil. If you’re reading this on your own computer, chances are pretty good that the only thing between you and a full stomach is a trip to the grocery store. As for sex? It’s natural. It makes us feel good. It’s healthy. Yes, it spreads disease if we’re not careful, but so does riding the subway, and I don’t see God bitching about that. So eat, drink, and be merry however the hell you please, and if God doesn’t like it—well, too bad.

Johanna is a member of CVA. The views expressed in this post are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan.
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People sometimes ask me why I don’t believe in God, but more often than not, they tell me why I don’t believe.  Everything from boredom to anger to my desire to sleep in on Sundays, to not liking all the restrictions on sex and masturbation.  While it’s true that religion makes me bored, angry and tired, and would seriously impair my sex life, those are good reasons to be frustrated with religion, but not reasons to not believe in it.  The people who tell me this have a fundamental misunderstanding that disbelief is the same as denial.

Disbelief is holding the position, rightly or wrongly, that a given premise is not true.  It is based on contradictory evidence, or a lack of supporting evidence.  Denial is the insistence that something isn’t true, regardless of the facts.  Disbelief is intellectual; denial is emotional.  I have a disbelief in God, not a denial of him (or her).  The fictitiousness of religion has nothing to do with what I want or approve of.

When people accuse me of being mad at God, I tell them that I’m not, but even if I were, no matter how mad at him (or her) a person might be, that doesn’t change whether he (or she) exists.  You can be furious with your spouse, but that doesn’t mean they cease to be.  They’re just sleeping on the couch.

But there are those who say “I just can’t believe in a God who would give kids cancer, or cause devastating tsunamis, or give George Bush a second term.”  Any God who would do that is certainly horrible, ruthless and immoral.  But even religion itself doesn’t claim that God has to be nice all the time.  God might just be a total dick, and that wouldn’t prove that he doesn’t exist.

I’ve studied a lot of religions and they all make contradictory claims about the niceness or meanness of their respective deities.  The Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is described as benevolent, loving, just and fair, but then exiles his children from paradise when they employ the curiosity he gave them, drowns most of the world’s inhabitants because he regrets how wicked and corrupt he made them, kills all of Job’s family and animals as a test of loyalty, establishes arbitrary rules over what you can and can’t eat and wear and how to farm, and where you can and can’t ejaculate, sends his own son to Earth with the express purpose of saying things that he knows will piss everyone off until they ultimately kill him for it, immediately followed by two millennia of crusades, holy wars, inquisitions and holocausts against the people who killed him, and repeatedly orders them to stone, kill, rape, enslave, degrade, attack, beat, and circumcise each other in his name.  Did you know that in the Book of Malachi he actually says that if you don’t believe in him he will smear feces on your face?  And these are the people who claim we didn’t evolve from monkeys.

It’s clear that any God who would do those things is a complete tool.  But that’s not why I don’t believe.

I don’t believe because the facts aren’t there, the claims are contradictory, the story is illogical, and more-than-sufficient answers have been found for most of the things religion once explained.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that you were to present me with irrefutable evidence that God does in fact that exist.  The evidence is sound and holds up to every scientific test that man can devise.  Will I accept the evidence?  Absolutely.  Will I admit that I was wrong? Of course I will.  Will I drop to my knees and worship the Lord?

Absolutely not.

The God you want me to believe in is a colossal douche bag and is thoroughly unworthy of reverence.  I wouldn’t worship a deity who gives kids cancer or smears crap in people’s faces.  That’s the difference.  You can choose not to worship a god even if he (or she) exists, in the same way the believers also believe in Satan, but don’t worship him (or her).  You can not support the president or your most proximal sports team, or think that your boss is a jerk, without insisting that they are fictitious.

When I say I don’t believe in any gods, just accept that my position is intellectual, not volitional.  I never decided not to believe. I just never really did believe.  So go on worshipping the giant dick in the sky if you wish.  Just don’t expect me to get on my knees beside you.

mr dan is vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by Johanna.
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We live in a complicated world that’s difficult to understand and often very frightening. There are two ways we can deal with this. We can make shit up, or we can figure shit out. Science is about understanding the world through reason and evidence. Faith is about understanding the world through belief, in spite of evidence. So when I hear people claiming that science and religion are compatible, I find myself incredulous, to say the least.

Faith and rationality aren’t just two different ways of looking at the world, they are two opposite ways of looking at the world. For religion, belief is the starting point, and everything follows from there, evidence be damned. For science, evidence is the starting point, and everything follows from there, beliefs be damned. Science begins with a question; religion begins with an answer. When considering the world from a scientific perspective, preconceived notions have no merit. It doesn’t matter what you want or how you think things should be; what matters is the way things are. Rationality is about basing conclusions on demonstrable facts. Conclusions are the goal; whereas with religion, the conclusions are foregone.

Of course, neither of these strategies helps any one person to fully understand the universe. It’s just too big. One person can’t have knowledge of everything, or even most things, or even a tiny fraction of all the things that there are to know. If we collectively pool our knowledge, we can do a little better, but there’s still a lot we don’t know and there probably always will be. Even within the scope of religion, where everything a person is supposed to believe is was allegedly outlined thousands of years ago, there’s too much information for any one person to completely understand all of it. On top of all that, there’s a lot about the world that just isn’t explained. Whichever method you subscribe to, our puny human brains just can’t hold enough information for us to understand the world we live in. We have to prioritize. We have to decide what’s important or interesting or relevant to our own lives and focus on the answers that are significant to us in some way. For rationalists, that means learning what you can about whatever subject you choose and accepting that, while their knowledge is by no means perfect, experts have more knowledge than you in their given fields. For the religious, this means following the tenets of your faith you find most significant or appealing and discarding the rest.

You can’t accept some fields of science and reject the ones that don’t conform to your worldview.  Unlike religion, science doesn’t work that way.  And before you say that religion doesn’t work that way either, think about the aspects of your own religion that you disregard. Nobody agrees with their holy book and religious leaders 100%; it just isn’t possible. Even fundamentalist groups that claim to believe everything within the Bible is the literal truth and that they follow it to the letter are ignoring the parts that don’t line up with their specific beliefs. People who believe God is love are ignoring the fact that in the Bible, God himself said his name is Jealousy. The Fred Phelpses of the world have plenty of scripture to back up their hatred, but ignore the parts that preach kindness. Some Christians are accepting of homosexuality despite the fact that the Bible condemns it. Most Christians eat shellfish.  Wealthy Christians always seem to forget that Jesus said it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven.  There are about as many definitions of the word “work” as there are Jews who observe Sabbath. Despite what Mohammed had to say about the matter, many Muslims don’t stone adulterers. And I’ve never met a Christian who refuses to wear blended fabrics. Every religious person has parts of their own faith that they choose not to believe, and more often than not, the decision about what to believe is made on an emotional level.

That’s not how science works. Gut feelings have nothing to do with what’s true or not. Medical science is advanced by the same scientific method as geology and evolution and cosmology; we may have more data and more advanced understanding in some fields of study, but the process is the same. You can’t accept one and reject the others. You can be more knowledgeable about one, but that doesn’t make the others untrue. Ignorance is not equatable to disbelief. Those of you who go to a doctor for treatment and accept DNA evidence in criminal trials but refuse to accept evolution lack a basic understanding of how faith and science differ. I say, if you’re going to claim that religion trumps science, you can stay home and pray your illness away. And for those of you who try to use science to support religion? That’s not science. That’s faith with smoke and mirrors. If you’re going to be faithful, do yourself and everyone else a favor and stop pretending you give any credence to the scientific method.

People who give lip service to science while still seeing the world from a religious perspective are missing the point. That’s how this whole “God of the gaps” thing got started; every time science furthers our understanding, there are people who say “right, but everything else is God”. There will always be unanswered questions. The faithful wield these unanswered questions like weapons; they say “yeah, well, your precious science can’t explain this!” What they fail to understand is that the scientist’s natural reaction is to say “Yet!” and get to work figuring shit out. Well, most of the time, the scientist’s natural reaction is to say “yes, it can, and in fact it already has,” but that’s because most of the time the person posing the question hasn’t been keeping up with the latest scientific advancements.

The thing about the conclusion being the goal is that each conclusion is just a single step in a long line of scientific investigation. Every question we answer is evidence for the next question we ask. When you start with an answer because the conclusion is predetermined and the evidence irrelevant, there’s nowhere to go from there. The question “what next?” verges on nonsensical, because you already have the only answer you’ll ever need; there is no next. There is no advancement of knowledge, no curiosity, no exploration. When you start with a question, “what next?” is just the beginning another great adventure.

Johanna is a member of CVA. The views expressed in this post are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.